FOREIGN TRADE: Disgraceful

By export controls and other
restrictions, the U.S. thought that it had staunched the flow of
strategic materials into Communist China and Iron Curtain countries.
But last week Maryland's Democratic Senator Herbert O'Conor, who has
been looking into Far Eastern shipping (TIME, Oct. 30), found that the
ban on such exports was about as effective as a sieve.

In the past five months, said O'Conor, no less than 14,373 tons of
materials useful in warsteel products, scrap rubber, transformers,
motors, fire engineshad been carried to China from U.S. ports and
from occupied Japan. Most of the shipments, O'Conor pointed out,...